Shia LaBeouf does everything he can to save The Necessary Death of Charlie Countryman, and that's quite a bit – looking every inch the movie star and acting it, too, he's really giving it his heart and soul.

The film's become an instant critical punchbag, as you'd expect from a mystical thriller-romance in which Melissa Leo's ghost packs her grieving son off to Bucharest, for no clear reason except, at a rough guess, Romania's film production tax breaks.

LaBeouf's soon seated next to another corpse on the flight over, and tries to comfort the deceased's cellist daughter (Evan Rachel Wood), falls head over heels for her, gets wasted with two British backpackers (Rupert Grint and James Buckley, winning points for sheer incongruousness) and runs away a lot from Wood's psychopathic hubby (Mads Mikkelsen, somewhere between intense and incomprehensible).

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None of it’s a good idea, but something about the frantic misguidedness of the project kept tempting me to give in. Since the summer of 2012, when it was shot, LaBeouf’s celebrity has gone into a self-inflicted meltdown, so it feels like a strange archaeological relic now – a reminder he can act.